


Sentiment

by TigerDragon



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Asexual Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Drabble Sequence, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Femlock, Hand & Finger Kink, Multi, Polyamory, Self-Acceptance, Sherlock Is A Bit Not Good, Spoilers, canonical pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 09:05:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1934994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's spent her whole life avoiding emotion, if you don't count her passion for intrigue (which is, she'll tell you, perfectly logical as an alternative to getting high), but caring has a way of sneaking up on you and whacking you in the back of the head with a blunt object repeatedly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sentiment

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Field Studies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1903977) by [TigerDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon). 



> This story takes place before, during and after "Field Studies." As with most drabble series, this is not a complete story. If you haven't seen the BBC _Sherlock_ series, this may or may not make any sense to you. Also, what rock have you been living under?
> 
> Enjoy yourselves. We certainly had fun in the writing.

Sherlock Holmes was five years old the first time she saw a mammal of any significant size die. It was a small rabbit that had been living in the garden and driving her father to a very mild distraction by chewing on the cabbage leaves, and it had run afoul of an adder which had fled the scene after delivering the fatal bite. She had remained very still, watching the rabbit’s breathing accelerate and then slow, watching the twitching decrease in frequency and intensity until the eyes became fixed and the breathing stopped entirely.

The clouding of the eyes was probably what people meant when they said that the light went out of them. Stupid. It was easy to see that there was never any internal light to begin with. Just reflections.

“Learn anything?” Mycroft was leaning over the fence, school uniform still pristine. None of Sherlock’s clothes ever stayed clean or unrumpled longer than five minutes. She’d been impressed, at first, but then she’d heard someone called a prig on one of Daddy’s shows, and thought it quite suited her brother.

“I expected the snake to come back. It gave up a meal because it was afraid.” She pressed her fingers to the rabbit’s belly. It was cooler than she’d expected. “Body temperature began falling before death.”

At least the shine on Mycroft’s shoes was a bit dulled by the dirt he’d picked up walking from the bus. “It wasn’t worth the risk to wait to see your intentions.”

Sherlock remembered dark eyes peering at her from the underbrush a week ago, and two weeks before that. Then she stood up, shaking grass off the stupid flower-pattern dress Mummy had insisted she wear, and smiled at her brother. He blinked twice, very quickly.

“Dangerous things can be cowards, too,” she said.

Mycroft said nothing, but he checked all his food very carefully for a few weeks after that.

* * *

 

“Mummy is terribly disappointed, Sherlock. So am I.” Mycroft stood in the doorway to her studio flat, his presence a distracting weight disrupting the balance of her mind. “There’s only so many times your abilities will get you back into uni.”

Sherlock, her plastic gloves covered with tobacco ash and fine particulates, didn’t bother to look up from her microscope. “Go away, Mycroft.”

He didn’t. Instead, infuriatingly, he closed the door behind him and stood in front of Sherlock’s battered kitchen table. He gestured dismissively at her experiment. “You can’t keep ignoring your responsibilities to chase whatever idea catches your fancy.”

“You’re contaminating my laboratory, Mycroft. If you’re going to nag me like a fishwife, at least wait on the landing.” She kept her eyes on her work, scooping the sample into a small glass container and then labeling it neatly as one-five-seven.

“And wait how long?” He didn’t move, but at least he didn’t stir up the other ashes with more gestures. “Passion is well and good, Sherlock, but you’re letting your emotions cloud your judgement. You have to grow up.”

“Like you, Mycroft? Wearing a Gieves and Hawkes suit and carrying about a swordstick in your umbrella and flying off to Southern Misunderstandistan to sort out the business of Queen and country?” She categorized two of the few samples he hadn’t spoiled as one-five-eight and one-five-nine respectively. “Get married and have a respectable flat and give Mummy grandchildren - you are going to try to pass that one on to me, aren’t you? I can’t imagine you expect to manage it yourself.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And inflict you on an innocent child? I’m cold, Sherlock, but I’m not cruel. What I want is simply to stop rescuing you from the myriad troubles you seem to enjoy so.”

Abandoning the wreckage of her work on the table, she stalked past him and scooped up her coat before shoving her way out the door. “I have never once asked you to rescue me from anything,” she said venomously as she fished a cigarette from the pack in her pocket and lit it.

His eyes followed. She could feel them on her every step down the stairs. “I won’t let your irresponsibility and capriciousness get you killed, Sherlock. Mummy would be crushed.”

“Can’t you make Her Majesty’s Government supply a replacement, Mycroft?” She laughed harshly as they passed out onto the street, the raw scent of the Thames mixing with the smoke in her nose and in her mouth. It was marvelously filthy. It felt like living.

His mouth pursed in frustration bordering on contempt. “I know you can behave like an adult. Do you simply prefer acting like a contrary teenage girl?”

“Bugger yourself.” Her voice dropped half an octave in anger, and she spun around to glare up at him with murderous intensity. “Maybe then you’ll stop acting like a prefect too scared of a call to Daddy to muss his trousers.”

Mycroft’s eyes narrowed, and Sherlock could tell the frown was involuntary. He was losing his temper. “And maybe if you’d let Wilkes fuck you,” he said blandly, “you’d be able to go five minutes without spiting someone.”

In consideration of her parents’ feelings on the matter, she didn’t flick the cigarette directly at his eye.

* * *

 

“DS,” Sally Donovan called over the distant sound of sirens, “constables caught some nutter trying to climb out over the fence. You want to give her a good shake and see what falls out, or just throw the book at her?”

Detective Sergeant Greg Lestrade sighed. His paperwork was already too deep for him to see his wife any time soon. “Sure, Constable. Bring her in.”

The nutter in question was tiny - no more than five feet or eight stone. A loose mop of dark curls was still holding itself into something resembling a ponytail by some bizarre trick of tangling he couldn’t quite believe, the leather coat had probably been expensive before use beat the hell out of it, and he could just about see himself in the parts of her boots that weren’t covered in mud from the street outside. She was properly handcuffed, arms behind her, and she was more than a little bruised up, but she didn’t look scared. She looked bored.

“Resisted arrest,” Sally put in, pushing the girl into the chair in front of his desk and glaring.

“If I’d meant to resist arrest, he’d have gone to hospital,” the girl said, still bored. “I just didn’t like his manners.”

Greg raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure. Care to explain why you were breaking into Scotland Yard?”

“Breaking out. Walked in - dead easy. Your security’s crap. Would have found the photographs, though. Bad timing. Guard was watching the World Cup when he should have been ‘round the other side of the building. Happens sometimes. Forgot to check the broadcast schedule this morning.”

Greg stared. The horrible thing was how much sense she was making. “You came to steal photographs, but had to leave because a guard was where you hadn’t planned him to be.”

“No,” she said, animated for the first time - with impatience, from the look of it. She twitched her shoulders a couple of times, and then the cuffs clattered on the ground and she waved her hands for emphasis while Sally started grabbing for her taser. “I had to sneak out over the wall because your security would have found the photographs if I walked out the front door, and the guard saw me climbing the wall because he was watching telly. Keep up.”

He held up his hand to stop Sally from tasing the girl. “What did she take?”

Donovan looked like she might shock the girl with or without his permission. “She’s raving. She didn’t take anything.”

“Obviously I was wrong about security.” Sighing in exasperation, the girl fished inside her jacket and came out with a surprisingly small digital camera. Fiddled with it. Turned the display so Greg could see it. “Not as wrong as you all are about the Hackney Slasher case. You’ve been looking for a butcher’s knife, but that’s not it at all. Garottings. Heavy gauge wire, big hands, strong. Cuts all the way to the spine, you see? No knife.”

The book was pretty clear on situations like this: ignore her freelance post-mortem analysis and book her. But following the book wasn’t going to close his case after two weeks of bad tips and cold evidence. A detective needed fresh insight, creative thinking.

A detective needed to be a little mad.

So he took the camera, zoomed in on the neck wounds. Sure enough, he could see now that the pressure had been radial rather than lateral.

“Shit. She’s right.”

Donovan started. “You’re listening to the crazy girl now? She’s the murderer, for all we know.”

“Don’t be dull. If I were going to murder someone, it’d be _much_ more interesting than this.” Rubbing her wrists lightly, the girl grinned at Lestrade. “I think you ought to take a second look at the man up the street who owns the antiques shop. You know, the one with the chandeliers and the sordid history with asphyxiation fetishists.”

Since Greg had not, in fact, taken a first look at any such person, he was now officially (unofficially) interested. “How do you even...”

“Internet. Chat rooms. ‘Information wants to be free.’ Why do you care?” The grin just got bigger. “Come on, Inspector, the game is on.”

Damn if he didn’t find himself smiling a little. “I still have to book you.”

“Can I ride in the back of the car, then? I really want to see the stupid bastard’s face when you find bloodstains under his carpets.” She bounced to her feet, then glanced down at the handcuffs. “Am I going to need those again?”

He didn’t know it yet, but he was going to become very familiar with the look Donovan was giving him just now. “No,” he sighed. “But I am going to need a name.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” she said, impatiently waving again. “And can I have my camera back now?”

* * *

 

There was something hitting her face repeatedly. Annoying. She wished it would stop.

“Jesus, Sherlock. You’re a fucking mess.”  Ah. Lestrade. Probably at his wit’s end again. She ought to see about that. Opening her eyes was annoyingly painful.

Someone slurred something incomprehensible. Not her, obviously. Greg tried to call an ambulance. She remembered how to stop him. “The case. Murder. Details, Lestrade.”

Her eyes adjusted enough to see that he was staring down at her, face closed. Calculating. Gauging her against the family of a dead body somewhere.

“If you don’t clean the fuck up, I can’t use you,” Greg Lestrade told her, and she knew he meant it by the way he chopped off the clauses.

She stood up without falling down and started fumbling for her coat. After a minute, her hands did what she told them. “Clinic in Surrey. Card under the skull on the mantle. You can drive me after.”

He didn’t let her leave the car while they worked. Since she wasn’t entirely sure she could walk without help further than she had coming down from her flat, she decided not to blame him much.

She took it as a personal favor that he let her ride to the station with the murderer cuffed next to her before he drove her to Surrey.

* * *

 

“And just how many times did he fall out the window?” Lestrade said, standing out in the vague dimness that passed for night outside 221 Baker Street.

“It’s all a bit of a blur, Detective Inspector,” Sherlock Holmes said, fingertips resting on the suppressed pistol in her coat pocket. “I lost count.”

Lestrade looked down at her with a half-smile that effectively communicated his disapproval, incredulity and total lack of surprise, then stepped off the curb. Sherlock didn’t bother with an expression when she went back inside. There was the business of comforting Mrs. Hudson, but John assisted her ably in attending to it - the sympathetic son so that Sherlock could act as the voice of stoic pride. All very by the book.

John didn’t ask why she resisted shooting that irritating man in the head. He probably assumed difficulty in disposing of the body or some lingering moral sentiment. It was neither, of course.

She let the moron live because a simple look at John’s eyes told her he wanted to hurt the fellow and not murder him. John’s discomfort with the act would have been unpleasant - not unbearable, but unpleasant.

A fourth round with the bins was a somewhat satisfactory substitute. It also kept her mind off the question of what she was going to do with a newly resurrected Irene Adler a bit longer.

* * *

 

John came home miserable from his lunch with Mycroft. He tried to hide it, of course, but he’d always been a terrible liar. Especially when it came to Sherlock.

When she’d first met Irene, Sherlock had expected John to be jealous. She was right, of course, but what had surprised her was the way the doctor responded to his jealousy. He hadn’t tried to punish her for her interest in Adler, and only objected to her seeing the woman insofar as he thought it was damaging to Sherlock. John had even badgered Irene into revealing she was still alive, presumably to save the detective grief.

Not at all typical behavior of a male sexual partner. It had impressed her sufficiently that she’d resisted the urge to discover how Irene’s nail polish tasted and settled for gauging the woman’s pulse instead.

So if John was miserable, that meant she’d fooled Mycroft. Excellent.

He held the file stiff against his body.

“She’s back in London?” If John was to believe he’d saved Sherlock’s feelings, she had to play out the scene accordingly.

“No, she’s, um.” He looked down at her, all his doubts and sadness and hesitation fleeting across his face. “She’s...dead.”

She paused, fingertips still on her microscope, and reorganized her expression into one of flat stillness. “Hardly surprising.”

“I’m sorry, Sherlock.” He put the file on the table. “Mycroft made this for you. Wanted to tell you she’s in America. I thought...” he shrugged. “I thought you’d want to know the truth.”

“Yes. Quite.” Her hands tried to tremble, which was quite unacceptable. She flatted them against the table and stood up. “I can always depend on you, John.”

His smile was bittersweet. “Yeah.” They passed a moment like that, her looking up at him, John staring morosely at the fake file. “I should probably take that back to him now,” he finally said. “Government property.”

“I’ll have the phone,” she told him, and helped herself. He didn’t try to argue, and she rewarded him with a brush of her lips against his fingers. “And hurry back.”

He did.

* * *

 

“There’s a kettle in the kitchen. If you want tea, make it yourself.” Sherlock kept her back to the door and finished the last bit of Sonata 1 in G Minor at her own leisurely pace. Bach would have approved.

“Mm, no, thanks,” Moriarty said. His gait indicated he was looking around the flat as he came closer. “May I?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just sat in Sherlock’s chair and bit into the apple he’d plucked from the bowl.

“Cable network,” she said, almost off-handedly, when she finally set the violin down. “A little obvious, don’t you think?”

The barest hint of a smile crossed his face. Moriarty didn’t feel the need to play human around her. “That’s the beauty of it. So easy and they still lose. Adorable.”

“I could have told Lestrade. I imagine your back-up plan would have been messier.” She settle into John’s usual chair and folded her hands. If she was smiling, she wasn’t aware of it. “Your need to apply a bigger hammer to everything is really quite dull. A room full of snipers, plastic explosives everywhere... doesn’t it ever bore you?”

“Yes,” he sighed, dark eyes wide and bottomless. “The whole world is boring. But it doesn’t have to be. Not for either of us.”

If they had been taking tea, her hands might have hitched. Fortunately, steepling them effectively removed the weakness of that particular tell. She arched an eyebrow instead of saying anything, because she loathed having to admit he’d departed from the script she’d worked out in her head for this particular encounter.

“Think of it, Sherlock,” he cooed, leaning forward. “The games we could play. The fun we’d have. Can you imagine?” Head tilted to the side, he smiled. It was his real smile, wide and toothy and animated by the mad, hungry brilliance that drew her to him. “We’d never be bored again. Don’t say it’s not your fondest wish.”

“I don’t think,” she said, her voice flat and still to keep the ravenous desire that flared under her skin from showing, “that John would approve.”

His face went completely blank. “Forget him. Forget all this,” he said, waving his arms as if to erase the flat. Then he was shouting. “Boring! Ordinary! Beneath you!”

She laughed. It was the only possible response. “Don’t be jealous,” she told the moulding over the fireplace. “It’s pathetic.”

In the corner of her eye she saw him snarl silently. Then his face fell back to a practiced sneer. “God, now you’re boring, too.”

Then he told her about his final problem. Well. At least things were going to be interesting again.

* * *

 

She only watched the funeral from a distance. Even in disguise, it was too risky. She ought to have left London on the day, gotten on with the business at hand, but the way he walked stopped her. The way he stood, like something was choked up in his throat.

Leaving and letting him proceed with his life was the only practical or acceptable choice. Even considering that Mycroft agreed with the assessment (which had required her to check it three additional times), there was simply no arguing with that. John belonged in London, safe. Simple. Inarguable.

But she couldn’t leave while he was sitting and brooding in the flat in his bare feet, either. She might have misread his psychological stability.

The trip to the graveyard was unexpected. He’d been sensibly avoiding it, unlike Mrs. Hudson’s irritatingly daily pilgrimages. But of course, her John had to make a speech. He was like that - stopped it up inside until he blew off in a declaratory statement composed at length. She’d been working on developing a formula on timing them before she left. Died. Whatever.

“Even if I weren’t in love with you, I’d still think you’re the best person, the most human...human being that I’ve ever known. You lied to me about a lot of things, Sherlock, but you didn’t lie to me about who you were, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

But, please, there’s just one more thing, one more miracle, Sherlock. For me. Don’t be dead. Would you do that for me? Just stop it. Stop this.”

Reason, logic and sensible paranoia might be arrayed on one side, but John Watson had put his hand firmly down on the other and that was apparently sufficient. When she flagged down a cab, she didn’t tell the cabbie to take her to the Diogenes Club or to Mycroft’s private airstrip - she told him to take her to the south end of Baker Street. She waited until she was reasonably certain John was asleep - or in bed with the lights off, at least - and then let herself in.

She’d made a copy of the key, of course.

He was standing in the dark kitchen with his pistol trained on the doorway when she crested the stairs. Well, a few unsteady nerves were understandable under the circumstances.

“Hello, John.”

He stood frozen for a long moment, then lowered the gun and strode forward to crush her in his arms.

“You monumental arsehole,” he whispered into her hair. “I’ve half a mind to kill you myself.”

She laughed into his shoulder because the world was suddenly, irrationally warmer. “You’d get caught, idiot,” she whispered. “Need me to plan it for you.”

“How the fuck did you - no, don’t answer that, if you show off right now I bloody will kill you. Why the fuck did you do that?” John demanded, again into her hair. He didn’t seem like he was going to let go of her any time soon. That didn’t bother her as much as she would have expected.

“Assassins,” she explained into the hollow of his shoulder. “Moriarty wasn’t exactly in a position to call them off once he blew his head off.”

The pressure of the embrace had eased off into comfortably firm, and John had started to stroke her back as he took in the information. “He wanted you to kill yourself, so he threatened to kill...me, I’d guess. Or Mrs. Hudson.”

“Both. And Lestrade for gravy. Had to be seen to kill and ruin myself.” She left her head where it was. His arms tightened around her as he turned to kiss her cheek.

“Do you think they’d arrest me for desecrating a corpse?”

“In his case, probably give you a medal.” She shifted her head and kissed his lips lightly - it was always vaguely unpleasant for her, touching mouths with someone, but it made John happy. “I have to go away for a while. I don’t know how long. Until I’ve buried his leftovers. Not safe to be alive otherwise.”

“Makes sense.” He said, letting her go to start for his room. “I’ll get a bag together.”

She caught his hand and held it. “Think, John.”

A slight frown appeared on his face, then deepened. “You think his organization or whatever it is will still be watching me? I’m just a nobody now. Why would they care, now you’re ‘dead’?”

“Think.” Softer, this time. This wasn’t like running tests on him. This was going to hurt.

His breath hitched, just a little. “If I stop acting like you’re dead, they’ll get suspicious.”

A small nod as she let go of his hand. Now he would understand.

He shook his head. “No. There has to be some other way,” he whispered, arms slicing the air. “There could be any number of reasons why I’d leave. For starters they know I can’t afford this place by myself.”

A subtly arched eyebrow was sufficient to convey her doubt that strained finances would logically lead to a free-roaming sabbatical across the world with frequent trips by private aircraft.

“You’ll be in disguise. I can put on a stuffy mustache. Dye my hair.”

“John.”

“Don’t ‘John’ me! Do you know what it was like, thinking you were dead? Not knowing would be worse. Not to mention how wonderful my life wasn’t before I met you, or listening to the trash on the news about you, or...”

“John.” She whispered it this time, took a step toward him, caught his hand again. Touched her lips to his knuckles. Looked at him.

“You - ” he started, but his throat closed and he had to try again. “You are fucking unbelievable.”

“I’ll be back when I can stay,” she told him quietly. “When it’s finished. I know I can depend on you to grieve sufficiently.” Her smile was probably rather ghastly. Well, needs must. “You ought to move out. It will help.”

It was odd, seeing him with his body and jaw so angry and his eyes so pleading. “At least let me know you’re alive periodically. Some coded message or something.”

“I’ll think of something.” Not what she’d meant to say, but there it was. She’d simply have to deal with it. Backing out now was unacceptable. “Mycroft won’t know that you know. Try not to tip him off.”

He snorted. “Right. What about Molly?”

“Ah,” she said.

“For the hundredth time, Sherlock, I’m not stupid. She signed your death certificate, and she isn’t stupid, either.”

“John,” she whispered again, and then traced her lips across his fingers. Made herself let go and step back. “ _Au revoir, mon chevalier._ ”

Breath coming quickly in his anger, John simply stared at her for a long moment. Finally, he managed to push words through his tension.

“Don’t die, you pretentious twat.”

She only smiled before she turned away. It was kinder than trying to explain the probabilities to him.

* * *

 

“He’s going to ask her to marry him,” Mycroft said mildly.

Sherlock continued assembling and loading the FN Five-seven in front of her without comment. Anthea became suddenly very interested in the way the seats were bolted to the deck of the plane.

Apparently her brother was feeling invincible, because he continued. “She’ll say yes. She’s quite taken with him.”

Sherlock checked the slide, then locked the magazine and chambered a round before screwing on the suppressor.

“Mrs. Hudson and the DI seem to like her, too. Very likeable woman, Mary Morstan.”

“Anthea,” Sherlock said, “just how many people at this little do am I permitted to kill?”

“All of them,” Anthea supplied without making eye contact.

Sherlock smiled.

* * *

 

“That was a nice dinner, I thought.”

“The ring wasn’t bad, either,” Mary smiled, watching the diamond catch the street lights.

John grinned, leaning over to kiss her. “Looks great on you.”

The rest of the ride home went about like that, with giggling and canoodling thrown in, and John was on a ridiculous high by the time they were unlocking their door and making their decidedly unsteady way back to the bedroom. They hadn’t had much to drink with dinner, which was good, because mixing downers with the enormous rush they were feeling would probably have resulted in broken furniture or otherwise wrecked living spa....

“I seem to be interrupting.”

They both jumped, John falling into a defensive stance in front of Mary and wishing his pistol was in his hands and not locked securely under the bed. Then the identity of the person sitting on their bed made it to his brain, and the alarm was replaced by anger.

“You.” He’d meant for there to be more than that, but all the insults were piling up against each other in their rush for his mouth. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Did I call at a bad time?” said Sherlock Holmes, curled on his bed in her Belstaff coat and looking not particularly alarmed at all.

“John?” Mary looked up at him, a hand on his arm. “Is she...?”

“Sherlock bloody Holmes.” He’d started to shake. That wasn’t good. Of course, getting arrested for murder was also not good, so he opted to stay where he was. “Get out of our bedroom.”

“Oh my god,” Mary murmured.

Sherlock shrugged and sat up, uncurling herself to edge her legs off the side of the bed. “Not exactly.”

Well, maybe he was going to move around after all. John hauled Sherlock out into the sitting room by her coat, letting her stumble a bit when he released her. “How did you get it? Lockpick? Got the keys somehow?”

“Spare key. Right creche, eye level. Dead easy.” She straightened her coat and sniffed in disapproval. “And you ought to have an alarm worth speaking of.”

Glaring silently, John held his hand out. She at least gave the key back without fuss.

“Why now?” he demanded.

“Finished in Serbia. Finished, generally. And Mycroft has some trouble with an underground terrorist cell. Seems to think it needs sorting at once. I thought of you, of course.” Sherlock frowned. “Mustache is going to have to go, but you seem fit. Good health, no recurrence of the limp. Won’t take me two minutes to get us a cab at this hour.”

He stared, then spluttered, and then he’d flung Sherlock onto the sofa and was being held back from further violence by Mary.

“Don’t you know what you did to him?” his fiancee said to Sherlock. “Two years! You let him think -” she paused. Sherlock uncurled on the sofa, watching the two of them with reptilian calm and smiling ever so slightly as if John tossing her around was amusing her.

Mary looked back up at John, and her eyes were wide. “But she didn’t. You knew she was alive.”

Bollocks.

“She - I - yeah,” he finally admitted. “Well, assuming she checked in. Which wasn’t very often,” he added, glaring at Sherlock some more. Seriously, would it have jeopardized her mission if she’d messaged him more than ten times in two years? “I’m sorry, Mary.”

Sherlock just sat, imperturbable, while Mary looked back and forth between the two of them. Reflex tensed John’s back in preparation for being slapped.

Surprisingly, it didn’t happen.

“So are you going?” Mary asked him, as if it was the really obvious question.

His mouth hung open. In his peripheral vision, Sherlock was looking at Mary again. Christ.

“Yeah,” he finally said.

“Excellent!” Sherlock smiled, pulling out her phone. “You have just enough time to shave.”

When he looked at Mary for some small scrap of sanity, she was just grinning.

“Christ.”

* * *

 

“Reporters,” Sherlock muttered under her breath as she stalked back into 221B and threw the deerstalker down the hall with enough force to rattle Mrs Hudson’s door, “are the most unspeakably dull creatures on the face of the Earth.”

“And yet you spent twenty minutes talking about your triumphant return,” John commented. “They’re only dull once you’re done showing off.”

She took the stairs two at a time, dumping the coat and scarf both at the door and flopping herself face-first across the couch with her usual dramatics. Of course, given that the couch was presently occupied by Mary, the results luckily did not involve broken champagne flutes.

“Hello there,” Mary smiled down at the back of Sherlock’s head.

“Mmph,” Sherlock reciprocated. Or argued. It was hard to tell which sometimes. Greg buried a laugh behind his hand, Mrs. Hudson sniffed, Molly Hooper elbowed her gawkily pretty new boyfriend in the ribs.

Mary shifted. “At least roll over.”

Sherlock’s exasperated sigh - clearly audible and obviously meant to be - indicated her displeasure, but she did. Tucked her legs up, too, which made her practically disappear into that coat except for the dark hair and half-lidded eyes.

“That’s better,” Mary said, patting Sherlock’s shoulder. “Now you can see the look on John’s face.”

“Redundant. It’s obvious.” But Sherlock did shift a bit more onto her shoulder for a better view.

“I haven’t got a look on my face,” John protested.

Mrs. Hudson patted his arm. “Of course you do, dearie, but we don’t mind. Now sit down, why don’t you?”

Sighing - and rearranging Sherlock’s dead weight to make room for himself - he did. It was actually a nice party - Sherlock didn’t gut anyone, verbally or otherwise, and restricted herself to squirming around on John and Mary’s shared lap space ‘trying to get comfortable.’

And then, inevitably, the three of them were alone in the flat. He’d tried to get up to see the guests out, in spite of it not even being his flat anymore, but Sherlock’s indignant squirming and Mrs. Hudson’s cheerful, grandmotherly innuendo had put that idea right out of its misery. Mary didn’t even make the attempt.

“Right,” he finally said, “are we just going to sit like this all night?”

And then Sherlock caught his hand, brought it to her mouth and startled licking around his nails like that was her way of answering the question.

Since John’s last date with Penelope, Sherlock had more or less commandeered his hand as what she called a ‘concentration aid.’ If they were sitting within arm’s reach - and a few ridiculous occasions when they weren’t - she’d casually nibble, lick, suck and bite at John’s fingers for as long as he’d let her. Sometimes it ended in her lips around his cock, and sometimes in them dozing snuggled together, and sometimes in him prying his hand away when his exasperation beat out any desire to oblige.

It was often sexual, always sensual, and unquestionably intimate. John had missed it like daylight.

“Sherlock,” he said, voice thick. When he tried to pull his hand away, he separated it from her mouth but not her surprisingly strong grip. She made a low, disappointed and quite irritated sound and tried to recapture one of his fingers.

“Sherlock,” he tried again, “I’m engaged.”

“John,” Mary soothed. “I don’t mind.”

He stared at his future wife. Opened his mouth. Closed it again.

“Don’t be stupid, John,” Sherlock murmured around his fingertips. “She can tell you’re erect. Pupil dilation, increased heart rate, unstable breathing. Drop in voice pitch. Obvious.”

“Shut up,” he groused. Mary laughed.

“It’s all right, John,” she said, taking his other hand. “It’s sexy.”

His mouth opened again. On the third try, he managed speech. “How much, exactly, wouldn’t you mind?”

Sherlock started a reply and got two of his fingers in her mouth for her trouble, courtesy of Mary’s hand on the back of his. For once, the detective actually looked surprised. John’s breath hitched.

“All the sex you want, love,” Mary murmured. There was a wicked edge to her smile as she started unfastening John’s trousers. “Well, so long as I get my fair share.”

Sherlock finally eased up on his fingers, her expression suddenly probing; for some reason, that didn’t prevent her from helping Mary with his trousers. “If you intend that to include some form of sharing my attention paid to John, I must inform you immediately that I find oral sex with women to be unsatisfactory. Quite messy. Too much like kissing.”

A number of thoughts crashed together in John’s brain. The decreased blood supply wasn’t helping. “You? Really? When?”

Laughing again, Mary silenced him with a deep kiss that left him dazed. “No problem there. I don’t like it much either but John’s brilliant at it.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Sherlock said, just before she wrapped her mouth around him. The way Mary watched his face, his expression must have been really fascinating or extremely comic.

“Hi.” He was fascinated himself. “Dunno why I never thought you’d like a threesome.”

“It’s the clothes. Nobody ever thinks a girl who dresses respectably wants a threesome. Silly.” She kissed him slowly, lingeringly, and laughed into his mouth when he gasped. “No competition for kisses is a nice touch. I like her even better.”

John was sure there was something he ought to be worried about there, or maybe make a smart remark about, but he couldn’t spare the brainpower. Maybe in a couple of hours. Days.

God, let it not be weeks. Well. At least he’d die happy.

* * *

 

“You have a girlfriend,” John said. Sherlock kept talking, something about the name Mycroft wanted to suck out of their heads. Even with the buzz in his chest about the case, the sheer weirdness of the girl - Janine - the relationship blocked everything else out.

“A relationship?”

Sherlock paused, biting the edge of her lip in displeasure, then backtracked. “Yes. Janine. I thought that was obvious. Moving back to the stomach-turning king of blackmail, John....”

Nope. Sherlock could keep talking, but John’s attention wasn’t coming along. Their pet names and affectionate gestures and general domesticity were bogging his brain, much less the idea of dinner with Mary and Janine and ‘Sherl.’

Then they stopped at the door to kiss. John had a moment of...panic? jealousy? when Sherlock leaned into Janine, but then it clicked together and he felt like an idiot.

Sherlock hated kissing. The few times she’d kissed him had been entirely for his benefit.

He waited until Janine was out of earshot. “You’re terrible, Sherlock.”

“Magnussen.” Sherlock started across the room toward her computer. “Napoleon of blackmail. Focus on what’s important.”

“Okay, yeah, in a minute. Why are you stringing Janine along like that?”

“It’s affirming,” Sherlock said, voice dry. “She doesn’t ask awkward questions. Are you going to let me finish, John? We’re rather on a timetable.”

Schooling himself to loose attention, John resolved to bother the detective about it later. “Fine. Carry on. Magnussen.”

“Magnussen is....” The door swung open, and Sherlock turned in a sudden, towering snit to send Mrs. Hudson off so she could finish her point, and then stopped. “...Here. Yes, Mrs. Hudson, show them up.”

Then she turned back to John, and her eyes were flat and serious. “Whatever happens, John, don’t punch him.”

* * *

 

“You still want to punch him. If you don’t relax your hands, they’re going to ache all day tomorrow,” Sherlock murmured behind him, using his height as a screen between her and Magnussen’s security guards. Not the first time. Or the first time she’d snuck up behind him, either.

“I want to do a sight more than that,” John muttered, but made an effort to relax. Sherlock had already started explaining how they were going to break and enter.

“Very clever, but how does that help us? Won’t his PA just ....” John had a sudden, uncomfortable rush of foreboding.

“Speaking of not punching people,” Sherlock said mildly while she ran the freshly corrupted card, “do restrain yourself.”

It was honestly a very near-run thing, especially when Sherlock held up the ring and trotted out some line about finally being able to get married under the law in a few more months and he could hear Janine choking up in the background, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the cold lack of feeling in Sherlock’s face once she was out of the view of the camera.

“Fake marriage, fake death, fake proposal,” he said flatly. “You just need a fake pregnancy to round out the set.”

“I considered it, but you are a doctor. There would be tests. Besides, isn’t one woman carrying your child enough nervous tension for you, John?”

After years of working with Sherlock, John had perfected glaring while rolling his eyes. “My gametes never being anywhere near yours would also be a tip-off.”

“John,” she said, turning to look up at him with one of those reptilian smiles that his body always seemed to split the difference on interpreting as terrifying or arousing, “if I were determined to do so, I don’t think you would present much resistance.”

“God. You? Pregnant?” he managed. “You’d sell your mum first.”

“I tried that once, you know. Mycroft was not amused.” The door opened, thank God finally, and she swept through into the office with a rapturously excited look on her face and then paused. Frowned.

“John,” she murmured crossly, “do women often run off and vanish when you propose?”

* * *

 

“Hospitals are boring,” Sherlock announced as John stepped into the room and automatically checked her chart. “I didn’t think morphine could be boring, but it is.”

He smiled. God, it was good to hear her complaining. “Uppers are more your thing anyway.”

“Don’t suppose you brought me any?” She faked a wistful, longing, soulful look that could have won prizes.

“Not a chance. I’ll bring Molly in if you ask again.” John stood at her bedside, hands in his jacket pockets. “You look surprisingly good. You know, for someone who was actually dead for over a minute. And then decided to run about London and rip open the sutures holding her insides together.”

“Well, you know, had to do some marriage counseling. Catch up on my reading - not every day you’re in all the tabloids. Priorities, John.”

“Glad Janine got something out of all this.” Shrugging, he sat in the visitor’s chair and watched the genius read for a bit. Well, pretend to read, probably. She barely needed to glance at a page to get everything written on it. “I’m really sick of you dying, Sherlock.”

“Not my favorite way to pass the time,” she said, eyes still lingering on a page, and he was suddenly - painfully - aware of the way her dark curls fell across her cheek and the faint uptick of a smile threatening at the corner of her mouth.

He brushed the curls away from her face and let his thumb rest on that almost-smile. The rough skin of his fingertips always seemed to scratch at the delicacy of Sherlock’s cheeks and lips, but she never objected. If anything, quite the opposite. His thumb hadn’t been there more than a heartbeat before she started worrying the flat of it with her teeth lightly.

Pulse jumping, John inhaled sharply. “Shit,” he murmured, and pulled his hand back. “Somehow I forgot how sexy it is when you do that.”

She bit her lip fetchingly and tried to catch his hand at the wrist. “John...”

“No,” he said, taking controlled breaths. “I haven’t gotten laid in weeks. There’s no way this doesn’t end in public indecency charges.” Focusing on the possibility of getting caught was good. It helped him not think about how much he missed Mary.

It also helped him tent his trousers.

“The door has a lock,” Sherlock suggested, as if that was obviously the biggest problem at hand. In the back of John’s brain, a voice very much like the detective’s continued to point out that the windows had blinds on this side and that nobody would need to look in on her for another half hour at least.

“You have a bloody hole in your chest.”

“Cleaned and well-stitched, thank you. You have two hands and a medical degree, if you’re so concerned.” Her eyes were cool and logical, but the smile at the edge of her mouth was wicked. He still didn’t know which - if either - was performance for his benefit. “I’m bored, John.”

His resolve lasted about a second more, and then he was laughing at himself as he locked the door, closed the blinds, and availed himself of paper towels and lubricant before sitting down again.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, just because he felt it needed saying. Mercifully, she didn’t point out - again - that that was what he liked. Then he gave her back one hand and opened his jeans with the other.

At least he wasn’t going to last long, he reassured himself plaintively. Decency had that going for it.

* * *

 

“If you just know it, you don’t have proof.”

“Proof? What would I need proof for? I’m in news, you moron. I don’t have to prove it, I just have to print it. Speaking of news, you’ll both be heavily featured tomorrow - trying to sell me state secrets. Tsk. Let’s go outside. They’ll be here shortly. I can’t wait to see you arrested.”

“Let’s not.” Sherlock’s voice was flat and cold, full of reptilian satisfaction, and there was suddenly less weight in John’s coat pocket.

John had only begun to register alarm before Magnussen was dead on the floor, blood spattered almost artistically against the white wall opposite. The man didn’t even have time to look surprised.

“Christ! Sherlock!”

Stepping carefully over the spreading pool of blood, Sherlock leveled the Browning and fired two more shots into Magnussen’s skull. The fresh splash patterns were stark against the wooden floor, the base of the walls. Sherlock’s slacks. “Bullets do funny things. Ballistics can be tricky. Best to be sure.”

“Okay,” John said, staring at the body. The soldier in him relieved his moral uprightness of duty and set about taking care of things. “Okay. We need to get out of here. We need to - to disappear, yeah? Get an alibi.”

“Don’t be absurd. The Security Services as going to burst through the doors in a few minutes and find a man dead and a gun - matching the ballistics - on the premises belonging to one John Watson. Don’t think they won’t know whose gun it is, either. My brother is a great many things, but not stupid. Here.” Sherlock lifted a gloved hand from her side and held out her phone. “Your alibi. Video recording of him confessing the non-existence of Appledore and me shooting him in the head. Just tell them the truth - I brought your coat with the gun in it, I shot him with it. Do you understand, John?”

He was shaking his head. “No, what are you-- you want me to hand you to them?”

“I want you to do what I tell you. I want you to tell Mary that she’s safe.” She stepped into him, keeping the phone toward him and the gun against her side, and then she leaned up on her toes to kiss him - lightly, inexpertly, briefly. “Take it. Now.”

His hand closed around the phone almost involuntarily. “You’ve got a plan, then? You’ve a way out of this? I can’t leave you, Sherlock. I can’t just let them take you.”

“Kneel down, put the phone in front of you and keep your hands clear. Don’t do anything provocative.” Her gloved hand squeezed around his for a moment, then let go. “My brother will take care of what needs doing, John. You can depend on that.”

It didn’t matter that he could barely breathe for the anger in his throat. Sherlock had asked something of him. “Fine,” he whispered. “Fine.”

She went out into the sitting area as the searchlights began pouring through the glass panes over her, gun carefully tucked out of sight, hands extended to both sides, face upturned. She stayed that way until the tactical team with guns secured her, until they picked John up and ziptied his hands together.

“Give my love to Mary,” she called as they took her away, and that was when he knew.

For Sherlock Holmes, a way out wasn’t part of the plan.

* * *

 

The door closed. Mycroft nodded to the camera in the corner. “It’s off. So is the microphone.”

“How charming. Privacy at last.” Sherlock, lounging in the cool metal chair of the interrogation room with her hands cuffed to the rail in front of the table, affected an attitude of exaggerated relief. “Here for one of those chats from my elder brother than I so adore? Do say you brought a cigarette.”

He pulled one from his coat pocket, lit it, and replaced the carton. “I suppose it was only a matter of time before my worries about you came true. I had hoped, though.”

“Don’t be dull, Mycroft. You were worried I was going to start poisoning people when I was six, weeding stupid out of the populace with designer deathtraps when I was thirteen and that I was going to be the English answer to Napoleon somewhere in between. If you worry about enough things long enough, one of them is bound to be true.”

He blew out a long plume of smoke away from her. She tried taking a deep breath to catch it, then sighed in disgust.

“I don’t suppose you have anything I can give them. A motive. A plan.”

“Appledore.” Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she slouched a little further down in the chair. “It was all in his head. Simple mistake. But you watched the video. You know all that.”

“And his mistake was assuming you’d act in rational self-interest.”

“His mistake,” Sherlock said in a soft, cold voice, “was putting what I needed somewhere that could only be removed by permanent measures.”

“Congratulations!” Mycroft snapped, sweeping his arm in a wide arc. “You’ve permanently removed Magnussen, left a power vacuum in the information black market, and, in all likelihood, accepted the Eastern Europe position. Well done.”

“Five months. Well, it could be worse. Perhaps you can send me photographs,” Sherlock murmured, cool and serene as if she was discussing the weather.

Mycroft’s rage drained away and his eyes grew tight. “Oh, Sherlock,” he sighed. “How quintessentially tragic of you to self-destruct from sentiment.” He took another drag. “I’m sure something can be arranged.”

“Good.” She closed her eyes entirely, but her voice hardened and sharpened. “You’ll see they’re looked after and stay away from them otherwise.”

“Provided they do the same. Yes.” He checked his watch.

“You ought to try caring, Mycroft,” she said, soft as a whisper again. “You might even find someone who could stand you.”

A minute shake of the head. He leaned forward to give her his cigarette, and she wrapped her lips around it carefully. “Look what good it’s done me thus far.”

* * *

 

John doesn’t even have time to mash his grief down into a manageable size before the face of his nightmares brings Sherlock’s plane back around. When Mycroft confirms it, the choking weight on the doctor’s chest fairly well explodes into joy.

“Oh, god,” he laughs, a bit horrified. “I’m actually glad Moriarty might be back. I think I might be a psychopath, too.”

Mary only wraps an arm around him and smiles. It lights up her face, wipes the fresh lines of anger and tears away from her eyes. “With me to look after the two of you, I’d say he’s buggered.”

That only makes him grin. Madly, probably. “And after you - or Sherlock - or I, for that matter - shoot him, we’ll be a very happy psycho family then, won’t we.”

“The happiest,” Mary agrees, and kisses him.

By the time they stop kissing, the plane’s taxied to a halt and the ramp’s coming down. Sherlock doesn’t even give it time to settle properly before she’s bounding down it, coat flying out behind her, eyes on fire with the thrill of the chase. “Four minutes,” she shouts, gesturing wildly as she rushes toward them in a cloud of dark hair and gloved hands and disarranged sartorial finery. “You couldn’t do without me for four bloody minutes, could you?!”

“Nope,” John smiles, catching her to him with one arm while Mary moves over and ruffles Sherlock’s hair. They all cling to each other for a moment, and then Sherlock is twisting away impatiently and waving to the driver of the car who’s been waiting to take John and Mary home. His expression is pricelessly confused, which only aggravates Sherlock, and it’s Mary who finally explains to the man that he probably ought to listen to the raving, diminutive madwoman on whose shoulders the fate of England (and for all he knows, the Western World) rests.

John gets Mary into the car first and slides in beside her, but Sherlock - finally finished putting the boot in on the ‘slack-jawed and drooling lackey’ driving them - crawls right over him and wriggles in between the two of them as if she belongs there and always has. For a moment she’s all squirming energy, and then Mary takes hold of John’s wrist and brings his hand to Sherlock’s mouth.

Between them, her lips around his fingers and her head on Mary’s shoulder, the world’s only consulting detective goes still and quiet. Only the eyes - burning, lost in thought, breathtakingly alive - give her away. John watches, half-aroused and laughing at the sheer absurdity of his life, because Sherlock Holmes is getting ready to go to war by using his bloody hand as a concentration aid. Again.

Finally, somewhere on the outskirts of London, she lets go of his hand and smiles. “You are still going to name her after me, aren’t you?”

“No,” and, simultaneously, “Yes.”

Sherlock’s laughter rings like trumpets.


End file.
